This has been a week for Jensen Huang to forget, and it leaves the AI trade’s flagship stock walking into earnings with investors talking about everything except chips.

For investors, the latest claims put a much bigger question mark over his position, and it’s the kind of issue that has claimed the jobs of many a CEO at some of the world’s biggest companies, said Josh Gilbert, etoro Lead Analyst APAC and Middle East.

Jensen has long been the voice that sells the AI story to the market each quarter, so a cloud over him is a cloud over the stock, and that cloud has turned into a storm. Nvidia without Huang was unthinkable a fortnight ago, given what he has delivered for shareholders over the years, and now it’s a risk they are having to put a price on.

Reports that the board is preparing to replace him take that risk from possible to probable, and because the market has only ever known Nvidia with Huang in charge, working out what it’s worth without him won’t happen overnight.

None of this changes how many chips the big tech names want to buy, but investors want certainty at the top as much as they want growth, and right now all they’ve got is uncertainty and markets hate uncertainty.

CEO scandals are not new, but never at a company so imperative to the biggest investment theme in the world. Nvidia has no named successor and no second-in-command, so if Jensen were to go, it would be left without a clear leader, and that would rattle the whole AI trade, from its biggest customers to the Asian suppliers that build its chips.

Nvidia has delivered plenty of big results over the past few years, but it has rarely needed one as much as it does next week.

On a new CEO or Interim 

If Huang were to go, Colette Kress is the obvious choice to steady the ship. She has been CFO for 13 years and fronts every earnings call alongside him, so she’s a familiar and trusted voice for the market at a time when it badly needs one.

The permanent job is a different story, though, because Nvidia’s edge comes from its technology, and the board would likely want an engineer in the chair. Someone like Ian Buck, who led the software platform that keeps developers tied to Nvidia’s chips, is the sort of internal name you’d expect to come up.

Huang has been the brains behind the product and the chief salesman rolled into one, and finding both in one person is going to be a huge challenge.